Holidays in Heck (17 page)

This is to take nothing away from Chinese art. The average Qing dynasty daub still knocks a Monet into the water lily pond. But bad news for painters: China's government has built the largest dam in the world. The Three Gorges are filling up. Artists will need shorter scrolls.

The Three Gorges Dam was begun in 1993, and the last batch of concrete had been poured in May 2006—a month before my visit. The water level behind the dam had already risen 200 feet. But, in past flood seasons, the Yangtze sometimes flowed that high. It would be the next 100 feet of water, rising gradually for three years, that would swamp the panorama, plus temples, tombs, and archaeological sites, not to mention 13 cities, 140 towns, and 1,352 villages.
Jamais
replaces
déjà
in the
vue
.

Sanxia (“Three Gorges,” as the Three Gorges are prosaically called in Mandarin) is the notch the Yangtze has cut through the mountains on the eastern rim of the Szechwan basin. The gorges are 600 miles inland from the Shanghai region at the Yangtze's mouth, where China doesn't look Chinese at all. Rapid economic development has made it look like everything on earth.

The city of Yichang, below the Three Gorges Dam, didn't look Chinese, either. That is, it looked Communist Chinese, a remnant of the Maoist love affair with concrete. It's a colorless sprawl of clunky bunkers, the factories indistinguishable from the housing. The East is Gray, or used to be. And cracked and flaking.

But economic development has come to the Yichang region as well. A part of it is Victoria Cruises, an American-managed
company that runs a handsome fleet of riverboats on the Yangtze. The ships are new, each with about 100 cabins and staterooms ranging in size from the more than grand to the more than adequate. Our ship, the
Victoria Star
, was 50 feet at the beam and 277 feet long, displaced 46,000 tons, and had all the swabbed decks, shiny brass, and polished teak that nautical pretensions could demand. Hatches in the starboard bulkheads led to private deck space. (I'm too nautically pretentious to say that there were sliding doors to the balconies.)

Traveling by river in China is preferable to traveling by road. The English drive on the left. The Americans drive on the right. The Chinese respect both customs. Mai and I arrived on the quay to find that there were 1,000 stone steps between us and the
Victoria Star
's gangplank. An actual coolie appeared with the kind of bamboo shoulder pole that I thought no longer existed except on the printed chintz of fancy upholstery fabrics. He slung our suitcases on each end and, balancing luggage that weighed as much as he did, skittered downstairs for two U.S. dollars. We were piped on board by the
Victoria Star
's band to the tune of what, given the band's minor difficulties with Western melody, might be called “Yangtze Doodle Dandy.”

In the morning we embarked for the Gezhou Dam, 8,579 feet long, 154 feet high, and completed in 1988. This was an earlier effort to tame the Yangtze. The dam's concrete looked homemade. As the father of three young children I am, perforce, a fan of handicrafts, but not when they're 154 feet tall.

The
Victoria Star
filled the ship lock with maybe eighteen inches to spare on either side. Later I talked to Captain Gong Ju Chen, a mast-straight and very captain-like fellow. Maybe, thanks to Mai's fluency and understanding of cultural
nuance, I could catch the real flavor of Yangtze shipping, plumb its lore. An Asian
Life on the Mississippi
? With 1.3 billion potential readers?

Me: “How do you maneuver such a large ship into such a narrow lock?”

Captain: “Very carefully.”

We docked twenty-some miles above the Gezhou Dam at Sandouping and got on buses for a tour of the Three Gorges Dam. There was bus tour guide humor: “We call this a ‘dam day.' Hope you do not think I am ‘worst dam guide.'”

Three Gorges was more professionally constructed than Gezhou, and it had better be. By 2009 the dam would be holding back more than 10 trillion gallons of water. Any slipup will make New Orleans after Katrina look as if somebody didn't close the shower curtain. The dam lacks the high swoop of dramatic grandeur that “man's harnessing of a mighty river” calls to mind. No Margaret Bourke White photograph could turn it into a
Life
magazine cover. It's a blocky structure blocking a gorge. The fluted downstream wall makes it slightly (and it is to be hoped not ominously) resemble a squat World Trade Tower. The thing
is
big, bus tour guide pun big—496 feet high and almost 1½ miles long. Apparently there was plenty of concrete left over from the Maoist romance. Thirty-five million cubic yards of it were used.

Two shipping lanes are built into the dam. Passage requires the traverse of five locks. There's also a ship elevator able to lift boats and the water they float in, 16,000 tons in all. Or, rather, it's unable to lift them. After the ship elevator was built, it was discovered that no cable ever made is strong enough to hoist it. “German company is being consulted,” said our guide.

China being still, officially, a communist country, in a confused way, mixed signals abound. There are old socialist touches. On top of the monumental dam is a monument to the dam. It's in the middle of a parking lot full of the Buicks, VWs, and Audis. Next to that is a Buddhist garden, perfect for meditation except that loudspeakers in the shrubbery are playing pop songs.

The garden, however,
was
perfect for a confused meditation on the Three Gorges Dam. It is vehemently condemned by nosy, whining world-savers. It is fervently defended by Communist central planners. These are two groups that are usually reliably wrong. And they both have good arguments.

Environmentalists say the dam will destroy the Yangtze's environment, trapping pollutants and waste in a 400-mile-long reservoir, which will become what that backpacking world-savers' bible, the
Lonely Planet
guide, calls “the largest toilet in the world.” Having spent some time peering into the Yangtze's waters, both up- and downstream from Three Gorges, I don't think the Ty-D-Bol Man's job could get any harder.

According to a Chinese government brochure, the dam has technology allowing it to “store clear water and discharge muddy water.” But, in the matter of technology and the Chinese government, there is that phone call to the Association of Big, Thick Cable Manufacturers that no one made before the ship elevator was built.

Ecologists say the dam will destroy the Yangtze's ecology. Species such as the Yangtze sturgeon will become extinct. There are no fish ladders at Three Gorges (or fish elevators, either). Fish won't be able to get upriver.

But, the central planners point out, boats will. The dam project clears navigational hazards for 1,000 miles inland on
a river with so much shipping that it has to be guided from what, at first glance, seem to be misplaced airport control towers along its banks. “There is disadvantage to the fish,” our guide said. “We have built an institute to solve this.”

Human rights activists say the rights of 1.5 million humans are being violated by forced relocations from the Yangtze valley. The central planners say the main purpose of the dam is to control the flooding in that valley. The worst flood in recent history, in 1931, terminally violated the human rights of the 3 million humans who died.

The dam's twenty-six hydroelectric turbines are expected to supply 50 percent of China's electrical power, although that is communist central planner math. Maybe the central planners haven't looked at how Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou are lit up these days. They may be thinking of 50 percent of electrical power when it was generated from the static of Mao jacket sleeves as Little Red Books were waved in the air.

The Chinese government also intends, our tour bus guide told us, to build an “International Holiday Center” at the dam. Perfect for people who plan vacations to Southern California to see the freeway intersections. Or maybe members of the World Wildlife Fund will stop by on an Indignation Tour.

But the central planners may be more right about resort possibilities than they realize. To keep the riverbanks from eroding as the water rises, thousands of acres of concrete have been poured directly over the contours of the ground. The Yangtze is lined for miles with rolling, bucking, precipitously inclined pavement. It is a skateboard paradise, a thrasher's Eden. Forget the Beijing Olympics and make Three Gorges the permanent home of the X-Games.

Anyway, the dam is built. The tour bus guide said, “Three Gorges are beautiful, but I do not think that living your whole life in a gorge is a beautiful thing.”

That afternoon the
Victoria Star
entered the gorges. They stretch for 120 miles. During the next twenty-four hours we traveled though the Chinese puzzle boxes of the Xiling Gorge; between the Great Wall-dwarfing 2,800-foot cliffs of the Wu Gorge, and up the five-mile opium pipe of the Qutang Gorge, where the river narrows to 330 feet.

I consult my notes. There aren't any. I had meant to write a magazine travel piece, but I stood at the rail, reporter's spiral-bound pad in hand, and couldn't look away long enough to get the cap off my pen. As the bus tour guide had implied, the Three Gorges are too beautiful to make a living in.

Sometimes I would step back inside the parlor deck, where the
Victoria Star
's private river guide, Michael Yang, was giving a lively commentary to the passengers. Who were not so lively. There were three package tours of Europeans on board, mostly British of a certain age and divided between the earnestly dull and the simply dull. The earnestly dull were deeply concerned with the fate of the Yangtze sturgeon. The simply dull were like a house party in an English murder mystery without the murder. Thankfully, there were two very jolly Australian couples for Mai and me to dine with at the “Independent Tourists” table. The cruise would have been more fun if it had been filled with Chinese—
Gan bei
!

The Victoria Line is popular with Mainlanders, but they prefer the downstream trip through the gorges. It's one day shorter and lets them have their vacation more quickly.
“Everyone on the Mainland is in a hurry, even with their leisure,” Mai said.

Coming back from the dam tour I'd overheard two of the simply dull tourists discuss the social and economic transformation of twenty-first-century China:

First tourist: “We did Shanghai, Beijing, and Xi'an eight years ago.”

Second tourist: “Must have changed.”

First tourist: “Traffic is horrendous.”

On the parlor deck Michael was pointing to a rock formation off the port bow. It's known as “Rhinoceros Admiring the Moon.” The Chinese have a different way of looking at things. I would have said Bill Clinton giving Newt Gingrich the finger.

“What of the fate of the Yangtze sturgeon?” asked an earnestly dull tourist.

Between the Xiling and Wu gorges was the birthplace of the poet Qu Yuan (330–295 BC). Michael said that Qu Yuan drowned himself in despair over the political policies of the Qin dynasty, and the event is still celebrated all over China in the annual Dragon Boat Festival. Anybody who's met a political-activist suicidal poet knows how the Chinese feel. But it seems harsh to make a national holiday out of it.

There are many important temples, pagodas, and places of historical interest along the Three Gorges. But I was having a bachelor-party-at-a-strip-club experience—intrigued with appearances and not too interested in listening to histories. I liked Michael's commentary best when fog descended on the river and visibility was zero. Then Michael, who knew exactly where the boat was, would continue his discourse anyway. It took me back to the days of being stoned in the college classroom, the prof going on in a very entertaining manner
about the significance of something—maybe the poetry of Qu Yuan—that was totally lost on me.

It was hard to sleep at night. I kept getting up to watch the ship's spotlights sweep the sides of the gorges. The beams glittered in the skinny, fitful waterfalls—reminding one of the Mandate of Heaven pouring approval on Chinese economic reforms, perhaps, or of prostate problems, depending on one's age. Along the river verge the lights shone on gutter-wide towpaths that had been cut into the cliffs in the days when Yangtze riverboats were roped to naked laborers and yanked upstream. Another picturesque feature of the Three Gorges was about to be sacrificed to ecologically woeful navigational channels and their polluting boat engines—doubtless to the applause of a million ghosts of Yangtze boatmen.

When we emerged from the Three Gorges, Michael had everyone go to the stern and hold up a ten-yuan bill. There, on the back, were two almost conjoined mountains, like a pair of rugged Yangtze boatman hands about to clap, forming the gate to the Qutang Gorge. The engraving looked exactly like what we saw from the taffrail, but slightly taller because it was engraved a while ago. Mai said, “Mainlanders would be keeping their eye on the ten yuan.”

After a fortnight spent in a hurry with those Mainlanders, three days and four nights on the
Victoria Star
were welcome. The ship has no casino, video game room, hot tub, wave pool, climbing wall, jogging track, or character actors in mouse costumes. The cruise directors, Jenny Goodman and Bob Shigo, actually gave useful directions instead of taking the
Poseidon
movie approach and turning the boat upside down to keep everyone busy.

Jenny speaks Mandarin and looks like a lass in a Robert Burns ballad. The combination startles people when she travels in hinterland China, she said, as if George W. Bush all of a sudden spoke English. The food—Western and Chinese—was good. The Chinese food was somewhat tame, which was also good. With the Mainland entrepreneurs and industrialists I had learned that duck tongue is good. Duck foot webs less so. Donkey meat tastes like corned beef. And chicken stomach boiled in hot pepper oil tastes better than it looks (and hardly could do otherwise). It was a relief to lift the lid of a serving platter and discover lo mein.